(Text by Chuin Wei Yap)

On March 28, 2026, at a World Trade Organization ministerial conference pitched at rallying its 166 members to address global trade chaos, a proposed deal seeking to spur global investment came before the ministers for the WTO’s decision.

The Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement is nine years in the making. It has been submitted to the WTO’s decision-making body for adoption at least 10 times. On March 28, 165 of the 166 WTO members either supported or had no objection to its adoption. One country objected: India. Under the WTO’s rules, India’s single objection carried the final decision. The deal died, again.

India today is the world’s third-largest economy by purchasing power parity. That it has climbed to this size is one of the defining achievements in the history of global economic development and human willpower. As it sits now amid the ranks of the world’s major powers, many of India’s trade and development policies and positions show that it is still ambivalent about what this power means.

In a Deep Dive commissioned and supported by the Hinrich Foundation, Visual Capitalist lays out a visual essay that travels the long road of India’s development, the geopolitical tightropes that it walks, its misgivings toward trade, and how the nation might find a way forward as it takes its place at the high table of global policy.

India’s reckoning today is of a large middle power playing a linchpin role in a fragmented world. The country’s scale, geography, and demographics make it pivotal to global growth. Yet the nation lags in development, ranking 126th in the world in per capita income by some measures in 2024-2025, far behind its peers of comparable size. Many of the setbacks that India’s policy positions deal to global multilateral order can in part or whole be traced to the weight of the nation’s history.

As Visual Capitalist shows in this essay, part of the Hinrich-IMD Sustainable Trade Index, India’s policy thinking is deeply shaped by its colonial legacy. In 1835, two centuries after England's East India Company first arrived in India in search of pepper and cinnamon, Thomas Babington Macauley, who later became the United Kingdom's Secretary at War, wrote a landmark document that set English as the official language of education in British India.

In his Minute on Indian Education, Macauley wrote that the policy would produce in India “a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

Macauley failed by many measures. Some Indians did get enough education to find their inner Englishman. Most, however, sank into ever-deepening poverty as colonialism dismantled the native industrial base while the Empire’s prosperity soared from extracting India’s riches.

Decades after winning its independence at great cost from the British in 1947, India tried a wide range of ways to stabilize itself. From state-led planned-economy models to import substitution and protectionism, it took a balance-of-payments crisis in 1991 to force New Delhi toward market-opening policies that have since transformed its economy, as our Deep Dive shows.

That newfound power is subject to the fragility of India’s economic underpinnings and increasingly sharp shifts in global geopolitics. India’s economy still suffers from income gaps, infrastructure shortfalls, and one of the lowest rates of female participation in the workforce in the world. Agriculture still provides nearly half of India’s employment and demands heavy state protectionism that slows India’s attempt to shift to higher-value manufacturing. The remnants of India’s caste system haunt India’s development.

On the world stage, India often plays deal-breaker on initiatives that seek to lower multilateral trade barriers or even, as with the WTO investment facilitation deal, those that help developing countries. As India’s commerce minister Piyush Goyal shot down the deal on March 28, he invoked the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, whose courage in the long fight for India’s independence is legendary. “Drawing inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of truth prevailing over conformity, India showed the courage to stand alone,” Goyal said.

It is unclear if Gandhi would have agreed. Global markets lifted India’s economy and gave it its heft. Today, India exports more services than all non-petroleum merchandise. It is a major global supplier of generic pharmaceuticals and aspires to tech leadership. Its booming economy is ranked by the International Monetary Fund as the world’s fastest-growing among major economies in 2025 and 2026.

In diplomacy as in trade, India now practices a canny mix of realpolitik policies, seeking closer ties with the US even as it joins China and Russia in geopolitical alliances and even as Chinese and Indian troops still sporadically skirmish on their Himalayan border.

India’s development challenge was never simply about economic growth. It is about a newly powerful nation still finding its way in a complex global landscape in which its history weighs on the lens through which it views its strategic autonomy. How effectively India balances openness with resilience, self-vindication with global leadership, and domestic needs with external realities, will determine its reckoning in the decades to come.

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